Murder in the Queen's Armes (21 page)

"I did?" Leon asked for the card back from Abe and made a show of studying it intently. "Oh," he said with a smile, "I see what you mean. No big mystery. I just transposed the numbers by mistake. Do it all the time. I’d make a hell of a meter-reader, huh?" Still smiling, he handed the card back to Abe. "Boy, you guys are
picky!
And I thought Nate gave me a hard time."

"Was Nate giving you a hard time?" Gideon asked.

"Well, no, not exactly a hard time." Was it Gideon’s imagination or did Leon seem a little uneasy? "But we’ve been spending a couple of evenings a week over beers, having some good old-fashioned arguments about my dissertation."

"He’s chairing your committee, isn’t he?"

"Yeah, and he keeps wanting me to do the thing like a technician—which is just what
he
is, when you come down to it—but I just can’t do it. You know, that’s exactly what’s wrong with archaeology: The emphasis is all on data, on digging up
things
and recording them." He leaned forward intently. "If we spent half as much time thinking about what it all means as we do photographing and drawing and recording every crummy, dog-biscuit potsherd we dig up, maybe we’d
know
something."

"I think you have a point," Gideon said, as willing as ever to take up an academic argument, but not unaware that Leon had rather skillfully changed the subject, "but you have to remember that archaeology is a funny science.

Even at its best, it obliterates evidence as it discovers it. If you have poor scholarship in the field, you destroy future knowledge. Look at the nineteenth-century archaeologists. Look at Schliemann; if he had known how to properly record and catalog what he found at Troy—"

"There, that’s just what I mean. We think in terms of catalogs, lists of
things.
We shouldn’t be writing catalog entries; we should be writing chapters on the social history of mankind. We’re supposed to be humanists, aren’t we?— not compilers of minutiae that nobody gives a damn about, and that don’t matter a damn when it comes down to it."

Gideon was experiencing something close to déjà vu. This was another installment of the discussions
he
had had with Nate over those beers so long ago. Only Gideon had been on Leon’s side of the fence then. Leon put his argument very well, better than Gideon had at the time, and Gideon sympathized with his impatience even if he no longer quite agreed.

"You got to remember," Abe put in, "sure, we’re humanists, but also we’re scientists, not philosophers. We got to depend on empirical data for our conclusions. If you start with lousy data, you get rotten conclusions."

Leon laughed good-naturedly. "The two of you sound like Nate. I can see where he gets his ideas. You ought to join us at the George one night; you’d enjoy it. But I still say the proper aim of archaeology is to learn about the people who came before us, not about inanimate artifacts."

" ‘You are not wood,’ " said Abe, " ‘you are not stones, but men.’ " He shrugged. "Shakespeare," he said apologetically. "Mark Antony."

Leon laughed again. "You guys are really something." He closed his paper sack. "Well, I guess I’ll get back out to the dig. I really enjoyed talking to you."

"I don’t think we’re finished yet," Abe said. "I’m still not so clear on this bone you didn’t find."

Leon looked at both of them, his youthful, trimly bearded face showing its first indication of strain. "Look, if you’re accusing me of something, how about telling me what it is?"

"Nobody’s accusing you, Leon," Gideon said. "We’ve found a pretty peculiar discrepancy, and we’re just trying—"

"Well, why the hell don’t you talk to Frawley?" Leon stood abruptly and pointed at the find card. "If I said I found something, I found it. That card was in the file, wasn’t it? Why don’t you ask Frawley why he didn’t put it in the catalog?"

"We did ask him," Gideon said. "He says he never heard about a femur, and you never turned in a card."

"Well, he’s lying."

"Hold it a minute," Abe said. "Let me get this straight. Now you’re saying you
did
find it and you told him about it?"

Leon made a jerky, exasperated gesture with his hand. "I’m saying I don’t remember—but if I wrote it on the card, then obviously I did. Jesus Christ, that’s why we
have
the cards; so if we forget something, it’s down on paper." He breathed deep, closed his eyes for a moment, and smiled at them. "I’m sorry, I guess I’m a little jumpy. Who isn’t? I think I need a walk, if it’s okay with you." He made for the door without waiting for an answer.

"Sure, why not?" Abe said, and then held up the sack Leon had left behind. "Don’t forget your fish paste."

   "THERE’S an old story," Abe said, as Leon, clutching his paper bag, shut the door none too gently behind him. "Skolnick borrows a kettle from Mandlebaum, and when he brings it back, Mandlebaum says, ‘Look, there’s a big hole in this kettle; how am I supposed to use it anymore? You got to give me another one.’ Skolnick says no he won’t, so they argue about it, and finally they agree to go in front of the rabbi to settle it. You know this story?"

"Does a horse in a bathtub come into it?"

"No, that’s a different story. In this one, they go in front of the rabbi, and here’s what Skolnick tells him: ‘In the first place, Rabbi, it’s a lie that I borrowed a kettle from Mandlebaum. Never did I borrow anything from him. In the second place, the kettle had a hole in it already when he lent it to me. And in the third place, it was in perfect condition when I gave it back to him. So you can see I’m completely innocent. Don’t blame me.’"

Gideon laughed as he finished his coffee. He went to a sink in the corner to rinse both cups. "It sounds like Leon’s story all right: In the first place I never found a femur; in the second place, if I did, I don’t remember; and in the third place, I only
thought
I found it—it was really a steatite carving."

"And in the fourth place," Abe said, stretching, his hands clasped behind his neck, "it must be Frawley who made the mistake in the first place, so don’t blame me."

The find card was lying on the table. Gideon picked it up, read it once more, and waved it gently back and forth. "You know, Abe, I’m not sure what this is about, but something tells me it’s important."

"Me, too. I agree with you a hundred percent. There’s funny business, all right, only what it is I don’t know."

Gideon looked at his watch. "Almost one o’clock. I’m going to go down the hill and have lunch with Julie. And I think I ought to drop by the Cormorant and talk to Nate about this."

"Nate? I wish you luck. Twice I tried to talk to him yesterday, just to cheer him up, and he wouldn’t even come to the door." He shook his head worriedly. "All day long he sits in his room and sulks. They bring him his meals, which he doesn’t eat."

"Well, it’s easy to understand."

"Sure, but healthy it’s not. Nathan’s got a depressive side to him, you know that? Maybe even melancholic. Healthy," he repeated darkly, "it’s not."

   BUT Nate, if he didn’t look precisely healthy, was far from melancholic when Gideon saw him next, and he was certainly not sulking in his room or refusing to eat. He was, in fact, at a table in the George, with the scant remains of a wedge of pork pie in front of him, while the barmaid was exchanging the empty, foam-webbed pint glass on his table for a second one brimming with dark, creamy stout. There was also a nearly empty highball glass before him. Flushed and disheveled, he leered and mumbled at the waitress, who gave him the blind smile reserved for unwelcome attentions from such patrons and hurried away.

This was all startlingly un-Natelike behavior. As often as the two them had huddled over mugs of weak beer in their graduate-student days, Gideon had never seen him drink enough to get sloppy. For a moment, Gideon, coming through the door with Julie, stared. Nate stared blearily back.

"Hey, Gid! Come on over. Buy you a drink. Bring the foxy lady."

Gideon hesitated, and then began to steer Julie toward his table. "That’s Nate Marcus. I’d like to talk to him."

"That’s Nate Marcus? The intense, dogged scientist I’ve been hearing about?"

"In the flesh, and stewed to the gills."

The closer they came, the tighter he seemed. Sweating and red-eyed, he wavered as he leaned forward to push out a chair for Julie, and he moved with a drunk’s exaggerated slow motion, as if his own chair was balanced precariously on a tightrope instead of sitting firmly on the sturdy old floor of the George.

"What are you drinking?" His speech was slow too, and overly precise. He’d been drinking, it appeared, for quite a while.

"Nothing, thanks. We just came in for some lunch. Julie, this is Nate Marcus. Nate, this is my wife, Julie."

"What do you mean, nothing? How often do you get offered a drink by an old buddy you just helped crucify?" He made an ugly, rattling, laughing sound.

Gideon sighed. It didn’t seem too promising. "I think maybe we’d better talk another time." He began to get up.

"Wait, hold it… please." Nate’s hand pawed flabbily at his arm. "I’m sorry," he said. "Not mad at you." His reddened eyes focused more or less on Julie. "How do you do, Mrs. Oliver? I seem" he explained graciously, "to be a little drunk." To Gideon he said, "Stay, please." Gideon lowered himself back into his chair.

When the barmaid came for their order, he and Julie both asked for Ploughman’s lunches. Nate ordered pints of stout for them as well. "Put it," he declaimed, "on my bill. If you please."

"Nate," Gideon said, "there’s no reason—"

Nate closed his eyes and held up his hand. "No, no, no, no. Nope." His head rotated gingerly back and forth. "No. Insist. Want you to know there aren’t any hard feelings.

Just trying to do your job, that’s all. Should have listened to you in first place. But …but…" His voice trailed away while he stared glumly at his pork pie. Then, as if drawing inspiration from it he went on. "But …God—damn—it," he said with labored precision, "how could you possibly think that I would… that I could fake a…"

"I never thought you did, Nate. Somebody did, but not you."

Nate shook his head and blinked. "But that’s what I can’t understand. How could… I’m telling you, I found it
myself!
" His hand jumped convulsively and knocked over the highball glass. The amber dregs ran over the wooden table, releasing a fog of Scotch fumes. Nate seemed not to notice. He stared earnestly at Gideon.

"What Gideon means," Julie said soothingly, "is that someone tricked you somehow."

"Tricked me?" He weighed this while he took another pull at his stout. "No, impossible. I found it by accident. It could easily have laid… lain there another three thousand years. It was under a bush, between the roots, with only a little bit sticking up. You could hardly see it when you looked right at it; just a tiny, teeny, weeny—"

"Then how did you see it?" Gideon asked.

"I thought," Nate said grandly, "that you believed me."

"I do," said Gideon, not a hundred percent sure that he did, "but just how
did
you see it?"

"Well." Nate appeared to be conducting a boozy search of his mind. "I was coming back from a walk at lunch, right? Okay. There was this scrap of paper on the ground, caught in the brush. I just happened to see it shine in the sun. Just a shiny blue scrap of paper. Naturally, I bent down to pick it up." He turned to Julie and explained primly, "Good housekeeping is essential during any excavation. That’s what good archaeology comes down to: good house-keeping." He raised his glass, toasting good housekeeping, good archaeology, or both, then drank and put the glass carefully down again, leaving a foamy mustache on his lip. He looked blankly at both of them, and Gideon thought he might be wondering who they were and where he was. But surprisingly, he found his thread again.

"I bent down to pick it up," he repeated, "and there, just a few inches away, I saw it. It was curved," he said, with sad intensity. "I knew it was part of a skull right away…." His eyes had begun to brighten, as if he’d momentarily forgotten what had happened since, but he checked himself, shivered, and stopped speaking.

The barmaid arrived with Julie’s and Gideon’s pints and wiped up Nate’s spilled drink, keeping well clear of him.

Tonelessly, Nate said, "Cheers," but did not lift his glass when they drank.

Gideon put down his glass. "Nate, forget about that part of it for a while. I want to ask you—"

"Forget about it!" he said in a strangled voice. With an effort he composed himself. "Want to ask me what?" he said calmly, then stifled a burp. "Pardon me," he said to Julie.

"Was another bone ever found up there on Stonebarrow? A femur?"

"No. No other bones. No femurs, no nothing. Why, what’s it to you?" He snickered vapidly, cleared his throat, and put on a serious expression again. "Who says there was a bone?"

"Leon Hillyer wrote up a find card on a partial femur."

"Leon Hillyer," Nate muttered with disgust, and then mumbled some more.

"Pardon?"

"I said," Nate enunciated loudly, "that he is too damn incompetent to fill in a find card correctly."

Gideon let that sink in for a few seconds. Then he said, "He strikes me as kind of bright. Didn’t he win a Grabow Award a few years ago?"

"Grabow Award," Nate grumbled. "He’s glick and he’s slib, that’s all he is."

"Pardon?" Gideon said again.

"I
said,
" Nate practically shouted, "that he is gl… slick and glib, that’s all. Wants to jump to grand conclusions without going through all the grubwork." He swallowed a long draught of the stout and studied the glass somberly. "Hell, who doesn’t? But that’s what archaeology is: recording and counting and sorting. And," he added with a fierce look at Julie, "housekeeping."

"I’m sure it is," Julie said politely.

"Damn right." Nate closed his eyes and seemed to doze.

The barmaid brought their Ploughman’s lunches: warm rolls, butter, big crumbly, blue-veined wedges of Stilton, pickled onions, tomato, and chutney. " ’Kew," she said. "You don’t suppose the gentleman wants another glass of stout?"